First private deep space mission will search for Earth-destroying asteroids

Funding raised by the B612 Foundation will send a telescope far into space.

The B612 Foundation announced the first privately Funded Deep Space Mission yesterday morning. It's called Sentinel, a half-meter infrared telescope designed to look for any asteroids whose orbits will cross the Earth's in the next hundred years, down to thirty meters in size. Construction is expected to begin this fall, and the nearly complete design will be similar to the already-successful Spitzer and Kepler telescopes, albeit slightly smaller. It's still 1 1/2 tons and 25 feet tall. The prime contractor will be Ball Aerospace, contractor for Spitzer and Kepler.

The B612 Foundation unofficially began in 2001. Astrophysicist Piet Hut and former astronaut Ed Lu held a 2001 workshop on Near-Earth Asteroids in Houston. The workshop attendees concluded that something needed to be done as soon as possible to be sure that the Earth was not on the verge of being knocked clean. Asteroids have wiped out almost all life on Earth more than once.

An asteroid impacting the Earth does so at a speed so high that the explosion can often be larger than a thermonuclear weapon. Requiring only a few seconds to hit the ground after entering the atmosphere, a large one could liquefy the Earth's crust at the impact point, creating a droplet that ascends into the atmosphere atop spreading circles of liquified Earth. The heat created sets the air on fire and sends a wave of flame hundreds or thousands of miles, leaving nothing alive in its path.

Earlier this month, a kilometer-wide asteroid named 2012-LZ1 flew near the Earth's system just four days after it was discovered. That asteroid was never a threat, but there was insufficient time to react effectively. Had 2012-LZ1 impacted the Earth, it would have wiped out much of humanity.

One big problem is that no comprehensive effort like Sentinel has ever been made to map every Near-Earth Asteroid. Asteroid velocities are tens of thousands of miles per hour, so by the time we spot one we've not previously detected, it's generally too near for us to do anything but calculate its orbit and wipe our foreheads. Even a common and relatively modest asteroid like the one that hit Tunguska, a rural area in central Siberia impacted in 1908, would probably kill tens of thousands of people today at best. The Tunguska asteroid has been estimated at approximately 30 meters, but it released about a thousand times the energy of Hiroshima.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) found over 33,500 of the largest asteroids and comets in the solar system before it was decommissioned in February of 2011. But despite the additions by WISE and ground-based efforts, including most of the planet killers, the majority of the smaller asteroids remain. According to the Foundation's website, "The orbits of the inner solar system where Earth lies are populated with a half million asteroids larger than the one that struck Tunguska in 1908, and the vast majority are uncharted." If one hit near a heavily populated area, it might kill hundreds of millions of people.

After the meeting in Houston, the problem seemed urgent enough to warrant the dedication of the scientists' lives. As former astronaut Rusty Schweikart put it, "Let's get on with it."
Hut, Lu, Schweikart, and another attendee, astrophysicist Clark Chapman, formed B612 to organize an effort to map all of the asteroids that cross the Earth's orbit. The Foundation is named after the Prince's home in "The Little Prince".

Several years were spent attempting to organize other groups and individuals to accumulate what was required to map the solar system. In a FAQ on the organization's website, the Foundation says it became evident that the effort wasn't working, and there seemed to be ample evidence that private citizens could organize to design and launch their own spacecraft. The design of Sentinel began then, with Foundation members working alongside other scientists and engineers, several of whom had designed other space telescopes. They chose an orbit well away from the Earth. Data will be relayed to NASA's Deep Space Network and distributed to several locations for analysis.

According to the same FAQ, "The optimal location for tracking Near Earth Asteroids, and for making the Sentinel Map, is from a location between the Earth and the Sun, from where a space telescope can scan Earth’s orbit while continuously looking away from the Sun." Accordingly, B612 began planning possible ways to get the spacecraft into a long elliptical orbit near Venus (orbit pictured above) with SpaceX. This month, they signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to support the project.

The funding, a few hundred million dollars, isn't quite there yet, but the Foundation feels confident that it will be soon. As their website has pointed out, larger amounts of money have been raised for other non-profit efforts "such as museums, performing arts centers, and academic buildings."

When the spacecraft is ready it will probably go up aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. Alongside the data that arrives from Planetary Resources' constellation of telescopes around the Earth, we may at least know what we're up against in the next decade, with (hopefully) a decade or more of warning before any asteroid that poses a real danger.

B612 Foundation has a good video and plenty of other material describing the mission on their home page.

First, I thought I should mention that Ball was also the main contractor for our most recent successful asteroid hunter, WISE.

Second, my big question for this effort is: how do they plan to get the data down? The number of images necessary to do what they want is non-trivial from low earth orbit or L1, let alone from here to Venus. Will they also fund an expansion of the infrastructure for bringing data down from space?

First, I thought I should mention that Ball was also the main contractor for our most recent successful asteroid hunter, WISE.

Second, my big question for this effort is: how do they plan to get the data down? The number of images necessary to do what they want is non-trivial from low earth orbit or L1, let alone from here to Venus. Will they also fund an expansion of the infrastructure for bringing data down from space?

Data comes to NASA's Deep Space Network and goes from there to JPL and the Laboratory for Space Physics in Boulder, CO. Alan Boyle has written a good article about the mission with a few more details at http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... scope?lite, or of course all of this is on the B612 website.

Oh, and thanks for the WISE reminder. I'm a bit embarrassed, but I've gone back and rewritten that paragraph to include a link to, ahem, my own article on WISE. My mind's gotten pretty weak.

If they have one oar in the water, they will process for the big honkers only and sent alerts accordingly. The infrastructure expansion is coming from the square-kilometer array now slated for Australia and South Africa. Terabyte computing jacked-up by astronomy.It just doesn't get any better!

If they possess motive, intent, and desire, then I think we're dealing with a non-asteroidal problem. That's when we double down on building the big lasers and interplanetary nukes.

More seriously, I'm dismayed and confused why I'm just now learning of the B612 Foundation when I've been obsessively following news summaries here for some years and over at Slashdot for as long as B612 has been in existence... and there have been a LOT of summaries about this topic in that time. Jeez, not one of the legion of cosmology geeks who posted and commented about those articles had any more clue than I did of its existence?

If I can miss the existence of this Foundation for a decade in spite of all but looking for it specifically, that makes me all the more worried about what we're missing up there that's headed straight for us!

If I can miss the existence of this Foundation for a decade in spite of all but looking for it specifically, that makes me all the more worried about what we're missing up there that's headed straight for us!

If I can miss the existence of this Foundation for a decade in spite of all but looking for it specifically, that makes me all the more worried about what we're missing up there that's headed straight for us!

"One big problem is that no comprehensive effort like Sentinel has ever been made to map every Near-Earth Asteroid. Asteroid velocities are tens of thousands of miles per hour, so by the time we spot one, it's generally too near for us to do anything but calculate its orbit and wipe our foreheads."

This is incorrect and misleading. NASA has run the Spaceguard, ground-based NEO survey for over 10 years and has already found an estimated 90+ percent of the most dangerous objects (those over 1 km). Furthermore, the velocity of asteroids has little to do with their observability. Their size and orbit affect observability. Some orbits are difficult to observe from Earth and would be easier to discover from a Lagrangian point or orbit interior to the Earth.

"NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) found over 33,500 of the largest asteroids and comets before it was decommissioned in February of 2011. But despite WISE's additions, including most of the planet killers, the majority of the smaller asteroids remain"

This is also wrong. WISE found a few hundred Near-Earth asteroids. Its total discovery count was about 30 thousand, but the vast majority of these were harmless main belt asteroids, and most of them were not "large". The largest number of discoveries of Near Earth Objects have been from the LINEAR survey in New Mexico, and the Spacewatch and Catalina surveys in Arizona.

Finally, the b612 society is frankly fear mongering by suggesting there is an urgency to this task. The job of finding the most dangerous objects is over. The smaller, and admittedly dangerous asteroids - those about 300 m and larger - could easily be found from the Earth, albeit over a longer time, and for far less money. B612 is dreaming if they think the job can be done for a "few hundred million".

Looking for dangerous asteroids is a reasonable activity, but there is no reasonable security case that can be made to commission a space telescope to do so. There would be some interesting science, but let's be clear about the reasons.

ARS - you need to fact check your submitted stories. I have enjoyed some of your columns, but the egregeous errors in this piece are giving me pause.

If they possess motive, intent, and desire, then I think we're dealing with a non-asteroidal problem. That's when we double down on building the big lasers and interplanetary nukes.

I'm pretty sure they would actually just hurl rocks at us. With the technology they had just being here, they could easily affect the orbit of some kilometer long rock. So yes, we would be dealing with an asteroid/meteor/large rock problem =)

Finally some real effort invested in this very real problem. Yes, it is FAR more urgent and real than this global warming bullshit. AGW is still only a theory, not even close to being sure. Asteroids, etc hitting the earth is a fact and only a matter of time until a big one hits again. Even if AGW was real, it would never be able to do as much damage as even a relatively small object.

If we had put as much money into it as we have spent in the AGW hysteria, we would be completely safe already, except maybe from moon size and up objects. Hell, even a fourth of that... prolly even less.

Yeah, if this was an AGW article, we would have far more comments already with all the self proclaimed heroes defending it. Oh well, after my comment I am sure more will come out from under their rocks.Who am I kidding, as if hypocrisy is anything declining in this age...

If they possess motive, intent, and desire, then I think we're dealing with a non-asteroidal problem. That's when we double down on building the big lasers and interplanetary nukes.

I'm pretty sure they would actually just hurl rocks at us. With the technology they had just being here, they could easily affect the orbit of some kilometer long rock. So yes, we would be dealing with an asteroid/meteor/large rock problem =)

that makes me all the more worried about what we're missing up there that's headed straight for us!

Straight for us? Nah. They’ll come at us sideways. It’s how they think. It’s how they move. Sidle up and smile. Hit us where we’re weak. Sort of rock they're like to send believes hard. Kills and never asks why.

Finally some real effort invested in this very real problem. Yes, it is FAR more urgent and real than this global warming bullshit. AGW is still only a theory, not even close to being sure. Asteroids, etc hitting the earth is a fact and only a matter of time until a big one hits again. Even if AGW was real, it would never be able to do as much damage as even a relatively small object.

If we had put as much money into it as we have spent in the AGW hysteria, we would be completely safe already, except maybe from moon size and up objects. Hell, even a fourth of that... prolly even less.

Yeah, if this was an AGW article, we would have far more comments already with all the self proclaimed heroes defending it. Oh well, after my comment I am sure more will come out from under their rocks.Who am I kidding, as if hypocrisy is anything declining in this age...

You do realise that when scientist call something a theory it's more or less certain to be true? What you are talking about is hypothesis (idea that has not been experimentally confirmed yet).

Global warming is 100% sure. All measurements point to increased global temperature. Discussion might be if humans are to blame or not but changes are coming no matter who's fault it is.

I like this. Might not be best use of money ever but honestly it's still by far better use of money than 99% of other stuff being done daily.

If they possess motive, intent, and desire, then I think we're dealing with a non-asteroidal problem. That's when we double down on building the big lasers and interplanetary nukes.

I'm pretty sure they would actually just hurl rocks at us. With the technology they had just being here, they could easily affect the orbit of some kilometer long rock. So yes, we would be dealing with an asteroid/meteor/large rock problem =)

You've been reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress again, haven't you?

Or it could be Babylon 5 reference to Narn bombardment by Centauri using Mass Drivers.

ebeshore has already voiced my concerns. It is a reasonable activity as it can be the 2nd preventable nature catastrophe after the ozone chlorofluorocarbon stop, but the urgency amounts to fearmongering.

I'll add the astrobiology side, which interests me.

Quote:

Asteroids have wiped out almost all life on Earth more than once.

Absolutely not. We have no evidence for such, except that it can, with low frequency, cause mass extinctions in today's biosphere (more later). On the contrary, we have many evidences that life survives easily:

- Mojzsis et al shows how realistic models of impactors on a ocean/crust biosphere have monocellular life surviving any feasible amount of impact rate up to and orders above the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB). Cells proliferate and spread faster than the impactors can keep up sterilizing - life is a plague on a planet. ["Microbial habitability of the Hadean Earth during the late heavy bombardment", Oleg Abramov1 & Stephen J. Mojzsis, Nature 2009 ; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 08015.html ]

Even complex multicellular life can survive crust busters straight away, instead of having to restart with eukaryotes. The Goldilock zone for surviving ocean vaporizing is ~ 1 km down, where we now have found nematodes.

- This was likely confirmed this week (!), since the news of a ~ 3.0 Ga bp (billion years before present) impactor on Greenland, the oldest impactor known after Vredesfort and Sudbury ~ 2 Ga bp. It likely confirms the theory of a Late, Late Tail to the LHB, where they have found 6-7 large ejecta fields in the record after the LHB @ 4 - 3 Ga bp but no impact scars until now. [ http://www.geus.dk/geuspage-uk.htm ]

The impact formation diameter is ~ 500 km, would have been 1000 km on the Moon but dug deep into Earth. It likely busted the crust since they tell of 800 Celsius environment in the bottom. Anything over 500 Celsius and you have (to my knowledge) dug down to the astenosphere, the upper part of the mantle beneath the crust.

So it may have evaporated the oceans. Life started before that, at least over 3.2 Ga bp where confirmed finds have been found. (The impactor seems precisely dated as these things go.) Yet we are here.

- Since the biosphere has survived for so long despite known impactors, the only realistic likelihood for extinction by impactor is small.

- The only known mass extinction by an impactor is the K-Pg event that famously killed off non-avian dinosaurs, maybe mosasaurs, and so on. That was only so because it happened to pinpoint a vast deposit of calciferous and sulfuric sediment waste that modern life had laid down. [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5 ... 4.abstract ]

It is very unlikely to be repeated, and as mass extinctions go it was rather smallish for one of the Big 5. If that is the best nature can do, we don't need to worry.

To sum up, this is mostly dangerous for human society. Our species remaining lifetime is some million year at most, Homo speciate quickly for a mammal, so the risk for us is minute.

Maybe we want to care for our descendants, in fact I am pretty sure we will. But who knows if they live in one planet societies like ours when we have a large system out there? It is all speculative.

[I may have time to add refs later. Not now. -> Done! Also minor edits.]

To sum up, this is mostly dangerous for human society. Our species remaining lifetime is some million year at most, Homo speciate quickly for a mammal, so the risk for us is minute.

So, it would destroy our civilization but you think humans will survive as species? I doubt enough of us would survive the event and the following years to be able to rebuild. It would be the end of us.

"One big problem is that no comprehensive effort like Sentinel has ever been made to map every Near-Earth Asteroid. Asteroid velocities are tens of thousands of miles per hour, so by the time we spot one, it's generally too near for us to do anything but calculate its orbit and wipe our foreheads."

This is incorrect and misleading. NASA has run the Spaceguard, ground-based NEO survey for over 10 years and has already found an estimated 90+ percent of the most dangerous objects (those over 1 km). Furthermore, the velocity of asteroids has little to do with their observability. Their size and orbit affect observability. Some orbits are difficult to observe from Earth and would be easier to discover from a Lagrangian point or orbit interior to the Earth.

The goal of NASA's Spaceguard was to detect "90% of NEAs larger than 1 km diameter within a decade", and that has been accomplished. As you said, some orbits would be better observed from an orbit interior to the Earth. And the size of some asteroids is difficult to estimate because of the variance in their albedo, 2012-LZ1 being a case in point.

I have adjusted the wording of the article to mention ground-based efforts, but the point stands. No comprehensive effort like Sentinel has ever been made, because it could not be made unless it is space-based and from an interior orbit.

The idea that a space-based telescope could not be launched for a few hundred million is your opinion, and time will tell. Kepler's life-cycle cost turned out to be about $600 million; about half the cost was design and launch. Subtract out design, decrease launch cost and make some analysis voluntary. The budget ends up in the right ballpark.

Your assertion that a few hundred million dollars is too much to pay for a complete survey to settle the question is, in my opinion, most unwise. Ten percent of large Earth-crossing asteroids remain. Thousands of smaller asteroids still capable of wiping out civilization remain. If one small space-based telescope can eliminate the uncertainty, we should not be sitting around citing statistics.

So, it would destroy our civilization but you think humans will survive as species? I doubt enough of us would survive the event and the following years to be able to rebuild. It would be the end of us.

It should be possible to rebuild society with only a dozen people remaining. Sure, it would likely take millennia. But that's nothing in geological time frames. A million years later it will be hard to notice that anything did happen at all.Homo Sapiens seems to be very good at surviving. Unless the environment changes radically, I doubt anything else will be able to rise above humans. Most likely Homo Sapiens will only vanish by evolving into something else.

That said, I'd still prefer us going without the need to rebuild everything ...

So, it would destroy our civilization but you think humans will survive as species? I doubt enough of us would survive the event and the following years to be able to rebuild. It would be the end of us.

I was unclear, since it was some doing and I was hurried. No, I meant that if it happens at such low frequency the odds are our species never will see it. Earlier Homo species haven't.

If one small space-based telescope can eliminate the uncertainty, we should not be sitting around citing statistics.

We are citing statistics because they are informative on what we are doing. That is after all what motivates these missions in the first place, or science in the larger perspective. Also, isn't this suggestion a political solution? At least it is realpolitiks, so it can be somewhat sane.

For myself, I am citing statistics because the perspective given almost unanimously by the media amounts to risky fearmongering.

It is nice to prevent natural disasters, since we have been powerless for so long. To make an analogy, while hunting comes naturally because we hunt, hunting predators is also likely motivated by a power trip. Do unto them, et cetera. We certainly don't need the pelts anymore, and it is much more harmful to the ecology to take out top predators.

But as risk for individual life goes, impactors come way down below preventable causes like overweight, smoking, and traffic. And for society, ozone was and population increase & AGW are more prevalent dangers, albeit impactors starts to get up there. We can do these things simultaneously, we want to do these things simultaneously, but we can also use a straightforward approach. If we don't track down the last impactors or find out how to deflect them, we will not have missed retreating much risk.

And if nothing else, if we do these things with a straightforward risk assessment policy, it removes the risk that science is seen as politically motivated. See the climate denialists strategies for dis-empowering socially important science (as most or all science is).

If they have one oar in the water, they will process for the big honkers only and sent alerts accordingly. The infrastructure expansion is coming from the square-kilometer array now slated for Australia and South Africa. Terabyte computing jacked-up by astronomy.It just doesn't get any better!

Um, not really possible. The asteroids are just points of light, like the stars. The only way we find them is to search for them moving. Their brightness is a combination of their size, temperature, and albedo. Because of that it is impossible to determine the asteroid's size until you have already determined it's orbit and if you are searching in the thermal infrared.

In other words, you find the asteroid first then you determine its size.

ebeshore has already voiced my concerns. It is a reasonable activity as it can be the 2nd preventable nature catastrophe after the ozone chlorofluorocarbon stop, but the urgency amounts to fear mongering.

1. Never consider the odds without first considering the stakes. I repeat: Never consider the odds without first considering the stakes.

2. The cost is not that high, and the expenditure provides a nearly complete answer to the question of whether or not we are in danger.

3. We are spending the money in ground-based efforts anyway, and those efforts can never be as effective as a space-based IR telescope pointed away from the sun and toward the Earth.

4. As a human being my chances of being killed by a tornado are 1 in 5000000. But if I live in the state of Florida, and someone comes to me to tell me that a tornado is coming, citing my low odds of being killed by a tornado will not make me safer. It will make me an idiot. Similarly, it is not intelligent to cite the low frequency of asteroid impacts as proof that one is not going to hit us tomorrow. It's better to cite the data one has formed from observation of asteroid orbits.

5. There are instances in life when one wants absolute answers rather than statistical ones. The possible loss of human civilization is one of them.